The World According to Bob

couldn’t really be happening. Not to me.

    I didn’t want Garry coming round to my flat at that point. So I began meeting him once or twice a week in Islington. There were pros and cons to the arrangement. On the plus side, it meant that I could top up my money and spend a few hours working afterwards. But it also meant that I had Bob with me, which meant that finding somewhere to sit and talk was a challenge, especially when the weather was bad. The local cafés wouldn’t let a cat on the premises and there wasn’t a library nearby. So we had to find alternatives.
    The first people to invite us in from the cold, ironically, were Waterstones, the bookshop on Islington Green. They knew me in there. I’d often pop in with Bob to look through the Science Fiction section. The manager there, Alan, was on duty and we asked him if he minded us working upstairs in a quiet corner. He not only said yes, he got a member of staff to organise two chairs for us in the history section. He even brought a couple of coffees in.
    When the sun was out, we used a place on the Essex Road that had tables outside. I could smoke there as well, which was a bonus for me.
    Garry and I were determined that the book wouldn’t just be about my life with Bob. We wanted it to offer people some insights into life on the streets. I wanted to get across to people how easy it was for people like me to fall through the cracks, to become forgotten and overlooked by society. Of course, in order to do that, I had to tell my ‘backstory’ as well.
    I really wasn’t looking forward to that part of the exercise. Talking about myself wasn’t something that came easily to me, especially when it came to the darker stuff. And there was a lot of that. There were aspects of my life as an addict that I had buried away in the farthest corners of my mind. I’d made choices that I was deeply ashamed about, done things that I didn’t want to share with anyone, let alone put in a book. But once we began talking, to my surprise, it was less painful than I’d feared. I couldn’t afford to see a psychologist or a psycho-analyst but there were times when talking to Garry was as good as talking to a shrink. It forced me to confront some painful truths and was strangely cathartic, helping me to understand myself a little better.
    I knew I wasn’t the easiest person to deal with. I had a defiant, self-destructive streak that had consistently got me into trouble. It was pretty obvious that I’d had a childhood that had messed me up. My parents’ divorce and my peripatetic years, flitting between the UK and Australia, hadn’t exactly been stabilising forces. I’d always tried really hard to fit in and be popular as a kid, but it had never worked. I’d ended up trying too hard – and become a misfit and an outcast as a result.
    By the time I was an adolescent my behavioural problems had begun. I was angry and rebellious and fell out with my mother and stepfather. For a period of around two years, between the ages of 11 and 13, I’d been constantly in and out of the Princess Margaret Hospital for Children outside Perth. At one point I’d been diagnosed as either bi-polar or manic depressive. I can’t remember exactly which it was. They seemed to come up with a new diagnosis every week. Either way, the upshot was that I was prescribed various medications, including lithium.
    The memories from that time were mixed.
    One vivid memory that sprung to mind was of going into the surgery at the Princess Margaret for a weekly blood test. The walls of the surgery were plastered in posters of pop and rock stars so I had the blood tests done while staring at a picture of Gladys Knight and the Pips.
    Each time the doctor assured me that the injection he was about to give me wouldn’t hurt. ‘It will only feel like a scratch,’ he’d say, but it was always more than that. It was kind of ironic, I suppose, but I’d had a phobia about needles for years after that. It was a measure of how deep my drug addiction had been that I’d somehow forgotten this and happily injected myself on a daily basis.
    On a happier note, I remembered how, after leaving the hospital, I had wanted to give something back and had begun donating boxes of comic books. I’d managed to get myself some work experience in a comic book shop nearby and had persuaded the boss to let me take boxes of unsold magazines for the kids at the hospital. I’d spent many hours playing air hockey and watching